Roots
Sad tales
By Marifi Jara
LOOK, no Quelimane, Mozambique dateline here! And I am smiling, happy to be back in Pangasinan for a couple of months.
By some interesting twist of fate, the first Filipino friend I made when I arrived at the airport in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, last year was also flying out for a vacation on the same day I was. And we were actually on the same flight to Johannesburg, but from there, she was taking a Dubai-Manila flight while I was on a Hong Kong-Manila journey. It was so lovely chitchatting because we never saw each other again while in Mozambique as she lives in another city though we’ve had occasional texts and got wind of news about each other through a few common Filipino friends.
At the Maputo airport, we bumped into several other Filipinos, working for a road project in a remote area that was contracted to a Japanese firm. Theirs was not a very happy homecoming because they are bringing home a fellow worker, a relative even of one of them, in a coffin – a victim of malaria. Their eyes reflected the sorrow in their souls. I shared the same flight with them to Hong Kong and so we had a chance to talk a bit more while waiting at the airport and inside the airplane. Their Filipino supervisor, who was traveling with them to help break the unfortunate news to the deceased’s family, said he was a bit worried that the others might not be coming back as their families would fear for their health and lives. But the men said they knew they surely would because there aren’t enough opportunities for them back here.
We bid our goodbyes as we deplaned because they were on an earlier connecting flight to Manila. While walking around the huge Hong Kong airport, trying to get my blood to circulate better after the 14-hour flight and looking at ways to burn four hours of waiting quickly, I bumped into a Filipina, with her six-year old son, loaded with numerous handcarry bags and quite unsure how to get to their boarding gate. One of the paper bags she was carrying, it turned out, contained a can holding the ashes of her cremated husband! It freaked me out a bit, but curiosity quickly got the better of me (I never thought you can actually handcarry that, but then why not indeed?!). And so we got to talking. Her husband was just in his early 30s, spent less than a year in London as a nurse before suffering a heart stroke there. Yet another heartbreaking tale.
But despite such sad stories they were carrying, you can count on the Filipino to muster a smile. What better way to kill time than to make transit friends, a fleeting comrade in a small part of a journey.
Looking at the many Filipino faces at the NAIA, I wonder how many others among them, especially the OFWs, were keeping a secret sad story in their hearts.
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